Did New Deal Grant Programs Stimulate Local Economies? A Study of Federal Grants and Retail Sales During the Great Depression

Fishback, Price V.; Horrace, William C.; Kantor, Shawn

doi:10.1017/s0022050705050023

Cited by 116 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Technologically-advanced capital goods, such as cotton harvesters, did not replace older 50 In a modified version of equation (6), the fraction of county flooded is interacted with a dummy variable for whether the county is a "plantation county" and a dummy variable for whether the county is a "nonplantation county." 51 As in equation (6), the specification controls for per-capita spending through the AAA, public works, relief, loan, and guaranteed loan programs (Fishback, Horrace and Kantor, 2005). Note that New Deal spending is potentially endogenous to the flood, particularly as networks developed by local politicians to obtain flood relief could be later used to secure New Deal spending.…”

Section: Vid Alternative Interpretationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

Hornbeck

Naidu

2012

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In the American South, post-bellum economic stagnation has been partially attributed to white landowners' access to low-wage black labor; indeed, Southern economic convergence from 1940 to 1970 was associated with substantial black out-migration. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties dramatically mechanized and modernized agricultural production relative to landowners in nearby similar non-flooded counties. Landowners resisted black out-migration, however, benefiting from the status quo system of labor-intensive agricultural production.

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Section: Vid Alternative Interpretationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

Hornbeck

Naidu

2012

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“…15 Robert Fleck (1999a), Fishback et al (2003a), andFishback et al (2005a) have had success using some of these political variables as instruments in studies of unemployment statistics, infant mortality, and retail sales growth, respectively. Of the group of instruments that have been proposed in the literature, only one variable meets the requirements that we have laid out above.…”

Section: Instrumental Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of New Deal expenditures on mobility during the Great Depression

Fishback

Horrace

Kantor

2006

Explorations in Economic History

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Using county-level data on federal New Deal expenditures on public works and relief and Agricultural Adjustment Administration payments to farmers, this paper empirically examines the New Deals impact on inter-county migration from 1930 to 1940. We construct a net-migration measure for each county as the difference between the Censuss reported population change from 1930 to 1940 and the natural increase in population (births minus infant deaths minus non-infant deaths) over the same period. Our empirical approach accounts for both the simultaneity between New Deal allocations and migration and the geographic spillovers that likely resulted when economic activity in one county may have affected the migration decisions of people in neighboring counties. We find that greater spending on relief and public works was associated with significant migration into counties where such money was allocated. The introduction of our modern farm programs under the aegis of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration appears to have contributed to a net out-migration that sped the transition of people out of farming.

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“…The results in this paper add to a list of beneficial effects associated with New Deal spending on public works and relief. Other recent studies suggest that relief expenditures were associated with lower rates of infant mortality, fewer suicides, fewer deaths from some forms of disease, higher birth rates, more in-migration, and expansions in economic activity (see, for example, Fishback, Haines, and Kantor 2007;Fishback, Horrace, andKantor 2005, 2006).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Striking at the Roots of Crime: The Impact of Welfare Spending on Crime during the Great Depression

Fishback

Johnson

Kantor

2010

The Journal of Law and Economics

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During the Great Depression contemporaries worried that people hit by hard times would resort to crime. President Franklin Roosevelt argued that the massive government relief efforts “struck at the roots of crime” by providing subsistence income to needy families. After constructing a panel data set for 81 large American cities for the years 1930–40, we estimate the effect of relief spending by all levels of government on crime rates. The analysis suggests that a 10 percent increase in relief spending during the 1930s reduced property crime by roughly 1.5 percent. By limiting the amount of relief recipients’ free time, work relief may have been more effective than direct relief in reducing crime. More generally, our results indicate that social insurance, which tends to be understudied in economic analyses of crime, should be more explicitly and more carefully incorporated into the analysis of temporal and spatial variations in criminal activity.

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Did New Deal Grant Programs Stimulate Local Economies? A Study of Federal Grants and Retail Sales During the Great Depression

Cited by 116 publications

References 31 publications

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

The impact of New Deal expenditures on mobility during the Great Depression

Striking at the Roots of Crime: The Impact of Welfare Spending on Crime during the Great Depression

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